Animated Poster in Adobe After Effects | Valeri Visuals | Skillshare
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Animated Poster in Adobe After Effects

teacher avatar Valeri Visuals, Adobe After Effects Instructor

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      1:06

    • 2.

      Get prepared for the course

      2:16

    • 3.

      The power of AI in Photoshop

      15:04

    • 4.

      Dive into After Effects and prepare the scene for animation

      7:22

    • 5.

      Creating a unique Parallax effect

      15:19

    • 6.

      Camera animation

      9:30

    • 7.

      Color Correction techniques

      5:50

    • 8.

      Stretched Text Animation

      16:56

    • 9.

      Improve the animation and render the final piece

      11:49

    • 10.

      Home Task

      2:17

    • 11.

      Outro

      0:19

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About This Class

Hey there! In this class, we will learn how to use smart composition tricks to make a static picture look super dynamic. We will use Photoshop's AI features to prepare the poster for animation. Then, we will dive into After Effects and learn how to set up the scene. We will explore the 2.5D world of After Effects to make the 2D scene look like a dynamic 3D environment.

I was inspired to create this super cool-looking poster animation after seeing Yash Tambe's animation on his Instagram feed. You can check it out [here]. After that, I decided to use this cool poster animation style and teach you some awesome 3D composition tricks that can take your poster to a new level.

This is a fun course for those who already have at least 6 months of experience in After Effects and are familiar with the timeline and keyframe concepts. But if you're a total beginner, don't worry! In the course folder, you will find my free beginner's guide to After Effects which you can watch for free on my YouTube channel [here] and learn After Effects from scratch.

With that said, head over to the "Project & Resources" section to grab the main folder of the course so you can follow along with me, and let's get this poster moving!

Meet Your Teacher

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Valeri Visuals

Adobe After Effects Instructor

Top Teacher

Hi, I'm Valeri! I am a freelance Motion Graphics Designer who also teaches After Effects, the best software for Motion Graphics. My job here is to teach you the best skills in Adobe After Effects so that you can start a successful career in Motion Design.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been into drawing. I started off doodling animals, cartoon characters, and people. As I grew older, I decided to take my passion more seriously and got a bachelor's degree in visual communication, which covered graphic design, illustration, and animation. And would you believe it? I even worked at an animation studio for a whole year during my third year of college! I worked at an animation studio for a year but eventually decided to go freelance full-time. I loved what I did so much that I st... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Intro: And convert a static picture into a stunning motion design piece. Hi, I'm Valerie, and I'm super excited to tell you about my new course on creating animated posters in after effects. By the end of the course, you will learn how with smart composite techniques, a static picture can look super dynamic. We'll start by learning how to prepare the picture for animation. While doing so, we'll explore using photoshops, mind blowing AI features. Then we will dive into after effects and learn how to prepare the scene like a pro. You will learn all the hand compositing techniques, focusing on how to make it to the scene look like a dynamic treaty environment. We will play around with the camera to create a minimalistic but super interesting motion in the stein. As a bonus, you will practice creating a smooth stretch text animation. Once you master the techniques in the scores, you can start using them in your own designs or pictures. So get ready to jump into the asm world of animated posters. 2. Get prepared for the course: Hi, and welcome to the course. First things first. Make sure you have downloaded the main folder for the course that I attached. In this folder, you will find four more folders. You will also see a PDF file here. In this PDF file, you will find all the relevant links we will discuss in the course. All right. And now let's talk about the folders we have here. In the AE folder, we will save our After effects project file that we will work on. In the render folder, we will save the final animation that we will render once we finish working on the project. In the design folder, we will save the files that we will prepare for animation. And in the final folder called assets, we will find the assets we will use in this course. This is the folder where we will save the assets we received from the client or assets we downloaded from the Internet. You will also see another folder called font. In this folder, you will find the font we will use later on in the course. Speaking of assets from the Internet, I want to show you a few cool websites where you can find free photos for your next poster design or poster animation projects. The first one is Unsplash, an awesome place for you to find unique and high quality photos taken by amateur and professional photographers around the world. The next one is Pixabay, a great place to find both real photos and graphic versions of what you are looking for. All right. Moving on to the next one. This one is called Pexels. Another great place to find some awesome high quality real life pictures. Great, and the last one is Freepi. You might know this website for finding great graphic assets. But you can also use the filters to find some nice photos, whether raw pictures or already edited ones. Awesome. Let's get back to our folder. I found this super cool photo of a Muscle American car on Unsplash. And for this road texture, I found it on Freepi. Soon, you will understand why we need this one in addition to our main photo of the car. All right, with this, we are finished with the first part, and we are ready to move on to the next one, where we are going to dive into photoshop and prepare our poster for animation. It's going to be awesome. So see you there. 3. The power of AI in Photoshop : Welcome back. In this lesson, we will learn about photoshops ie features and practice a variety of selection techniques to separate the objects in our picture and prepare it for animation. All right, so after reviewing the assets we are going to use for this project, we will use Photoshop to prepare our poster for animation. Since we will be using Photoshop Sie features, make sure you are using Photoshop version 2024 or above. With that said, let's open Photoshop and get started. Now, let's head to file and open up the photo of the car we have in the assets folder. And now, to make sure we're all on the same page with the panel layout, let's open the windows menu, go to workspace, and pick essentials, which is the default photoshop panel arrangement. Next up, we need to open the AI feature. If you can't find it, open the windows menu again, scroll down a bit, and be sure to activate the contextual task bar. Okay, now we're set to start prepping this photo for animation. What I mean is that we need to split the objects in this picture into separate layers, so we can animate them in the animation phase and after effects. But before we dive into that, I want to share something super handy. That'll help you understand how to split the objects in the picture you're working on. So when you're working with a picture that has a main object, like a car in a background. And you want to give your poster a three D look. You can split the picture into three main parts. This helps you figure out which parts of the photo need to be separated. The three main parts are the foreground, mid round, and background. The foreground is the part of the picture that's closest to the camera. The mid round is the part in the middle of the scene, and the background is the farthest point from the camera. Dividing the photo into these parts, you can really improve the look of the animation and decide which parts need to be separated and placed in the three D space when creating the animation. With this in mind, let's figure out where each part is in our photo. In our case, the foreground is the blurrest part of the road since it's the closest to the camera. The mid round is where the car is, and the background is the farthest point behind the car, where we can see the forest and the blue sky. Now, we can start breaking down the objects in this photo, starting with the main one, the car. First, let's unlock our layer and make a duplicate using the control J shortcut. We can then turn off the original layer. Let's also quickly go over how to move the canvas panel before we continue. For example, you can scroll the mouse wheel while holding control or the command key to move the canvas sideways. Scrolling the mouse while holding out or the option key will zoom in and out. Awesome. So now let's get to work on separating the car from the picture. But before that, we need to remove the man's head that we can see inside the car. We'll use the generative fill feature, one of the AI features in photoshop. To start, we need to select the problematic area. We can do this by long pressing the L asso tool and selecting the regular Lasso tool. Next, let's manually select the head area, making sure to close the shape we drew. Then click on generative fill and generate. Now, we wait a few seconds for the process to finish. Please note, this process can sometimes take a few minutes, so let's be patient and wait for the results. Once the process is finished, photoshop will generate three variations for us to choose from. If you extend this area, you can see the versions visually. Your options might be slightly different from mine, but they will be pretty close. In my case, I'll choose the third version. Now, let's finish this action by merging these layers together. We can do this by right clicking on the layer and choosing, merge layers, or you can use the shortcut. Okay, so now that we've dealt with the person inside the car, we can select this layer and separate the car from the background. Do that, we can use the select subject action from the contextual task bar or the Quick Selection tool by clicking on the select subject function. I'll use it from the contextual task bar. Now, we need to adjust the edges of the selection. Make sure you're working with the Quick Selection tool. Let's adjust the size of the brush we're using, either from here or by using the bracket keys. Once we're good with the size of the brush, pay attention to the icon inside it. The icon we see here is a minus, which means that if we click somewhere, we'll actually delete some areas of the selection. In our case, we need to add more to the selection. To do this, hold down the shift key to convert the brush from a minus to a plus. Then let's click the areas we want to add to the selection. Go over all the cars edges to make sure we're not missing any part of the car. In this area, let's use the left bracket key to minimize the brush, and now hold shift and click in this area. Let's continue selecting the part up here as well. Don't worry too much about the rough areas of the selection. Soon we'll fix them all. By the way, to move the screen, hold down the spacebar key and drag the screen wherever you need. Keep checking the car's edges to get a nice selection of the car. I had some problem selecting this area, but that's okay. Let's press Control Z to undo the action and come back to deal with this later. Okay, I think we're done with the selection, and now we're ready to mask it to separate it from the background. To do that, we can either click here or here to mask our selection. Now, let's deal with the problematic part manually. For this, we need to make sure we're selecting the mask and then select the brush tool. You can press B to switch quickly to the brush tool. And now to choose a different brush type. We can right click and then select the hard round brush. Now, if we click here, we can mask the area we clicked on. To unmask this area, just switch the brush color to white and click on the picture. To quickly switch between colors, we can use the x key. With that said, let's mask and unmask the problematic part we have in this selection. You can hold down the shift key while using the brush to make the line straight. Let's continue doing it for the rest of the car. We can straighten this area. We can straighten this area. Once we are good with the selection, let's leave this layer with the mask, so we can go back to the mask and adjust it if we want to adjust some areas of the car in the future. All right, and now let's press enter and change the name of this layer to car. Awesome, now we can turn this layer off and duplicate the original layer again to separate the forest we have in the background. First, we need to get rid of the car so we can get a full forest. Right now, because of the car, we can't see some areas of the forest. First, let's use the rectangular marquee tool, Zoom out a little bit, and then select roughly the car. I. And now to remove it, we can use the generative fill tool again. This process can take a while, as it is a very hard task for the software to remove such a big object from the scene. So be patient and don't cancel the process. Awesome. Now let's pick the best version and merge these two layers. I like this one. Now, select these two layers and merge them. And now, when we have a brand new picture without the car, we can use the quick selection tool to select the forest. Let's increase the size of the brush. Now zoom in and start selecting the forest areas in the picture. Awesome. And now, let's learn how to tackle the dense areas with small leaves like this one. In this situation, we need to use the select and mask function, and then use the refined edged brush tool, which is perfect for these situations. Let's make sure the brush is the right size and start clicking once on the dense areas with leaves. Let's go over the entire forest and fix the problematic areas. If you want to reverse the action, hold down the Ault key and click once on the area you want to adjust. All right. So once we are good with the selection, we can click, and then click here to create the mask from the selection we made. Awesome. And now I want to give you a small tip. When you know that in the near future, you will move this layer across the three D space in your after effects scene. Always create an extra area for the assets that will be used in your scene, like mountains, skies, forests, et cetera. And to create the extra area for our forest, all we need to do is to select the bottom part of the forest and use the generative fill future to let photoshop do its magic and create the rest of the forest that is missing here. I'll say it once again, please be patient with this process because it is very difficult for photoshop to generate the missing area we need. Let's see what we've got. In my case, the first version is better than the others. Great. Now let's merge these two layers and change the name of this layer to forrest. And now let's turn off this layer and duplicate the original again using Control J to separate the sky from the picture. Let's position the canvas to see the upper part of the picture. Now, we can select the sky and mask the selection. Remember, it's better to have an extra part of the layer when you know this layer will be used in the three D space in after effects. This gives us more freedom to experiment in the scene. Question. What do we need to do to get the missing bottom part of the sky? We can use the generative fill to create the missing part. Just make sure you select the picture, not the mask, and then choose the area to use the generative fill. Let's wait a few minutes for photoshop to generate something. In my case, photoshop generated something that I don't need. In cases like that, we can delete the generated layer. Then select the mask, delete it, and then apply the mask to the layer. This way, we will have a layer only with the sky in it, which will not confuse photoshop when we try to generate as it was when there was a mask on this layer. All right. So now we have some better results. I'll go with the second variation since it only has the skies in it. Just so you know, you could also grab a cool sky image from the Internet and use it in your project. I didn't do it this time because I want us to practice using the generative fill feature in photoshop. Anyway, let's keep going with the lesson. Now I want us to create a layer just for the road. So let's select this layer and then make a selection of everything that is not the road. Now, just hit the delete or backspace keys to remove the selected area. Let's call this layer, road, and then exit the selection. Make sure you've got the rectangular Marquee tool selected and click once somewhere in the picture. This will stop the selection. With this, we're all set with prepping the photo for animation. I'd suggest not flattening the car layer and leaving it with the mask, since we might need to adjust the mask later. Now, let's go to file and click on Save as to save the file in our design folder. Don't forget to change the name and make sure you save it as a photoshop PSD file. Now, click on Save and then okay. That's it for this part, and we're ready to move on to the next one, where we'll dive into after effects. It's going to be awesome, so see you there. But before that, feel free to take a break from sitting, grab a refreshing drink, and do some light stretches before diving back into the course. These quick activities will help you stay focused for the next lesson. 4. Dive into After Effects and prepare the scene for animation: Welcome back. Now that we've prepped our photo for animation, it's time to jump into after effects, so let's open it up together. Now, let's close the home window and make sure we all have the same panel arrangement. Just click on default arrangement up here. And now, before we start working on the project, let's make sure your software preferences are all set for a perfect workflow. To do this, go to edit, then preferences, and click on General. For Mac users, the preferences might be accessed in a slightly different way. Okay, so once we're here, just make sure all the checkboxes match mine. Now, I'll go over the rest of the preferences, and you can pause the video to check and adjust your preferences like I did. In the memory and performance section, you might see different numbers. This is because your computer's capabilities are different from mine. But that's no big deal. All you need to know is that the installed RAM on your computer is what gives power to your applications. To make after effects work better, just lower this number. This way, after effects will get more power. All right. Let's move on. Once we've done that, we are ready to start working on the project. If you are new to After effects, I highly recommend watching the beginners guide to after effects that I created, especially for those who want to understand the software better and learn in depth about the functions and actions we will use during the animation phase. All right, enough with the talking. Let's create our first composition. We can name it master comp, since this will be our main composition where we will work and create our main scene. Next, let's choose the size of our first composition. Let's choose the social media portrait HD preset, which is great for social media platforms. We can leave the frame rate at 30. Now, set the duration to 15 seconds and the background color to black. Awesome. And now let's go over some key things to keep us all on the same page. If you spot a red message in the preview panel, hit the Caps lock key to turn it off. If the black color isn't showing in your preview screen, click here to toggle the transparency background. Also. Make sure the preview resolution is set to full and the preview screen is set to fit. Next, if the numbers in the timeline look different from mine, hover over the time display, hold down control, and click on the numbers once to switch between frames and seconds. Let's set it to show the seconds in our case. Lastly, make sure your keyboard language is set to English so that the shortcuts we'll use during the workflow will work properly. Awesome, and now it's time to bring our photoshop file into after effects. We'll start by double clicking in the empty area in the project panel, and then locate the file, select it, and press Import. Importing, we should choose to import it as a composition with the retained layer size option. This way, the layers will match the size of the object inside the layer, not the size of the document. This way, it will be much more comfortable to work with the layers in after effects. Then, let's choose to import it with a merged layer styles into footage option. In our case, this does not really matter since we don't have any layer styles applied to the layers in the original photoshop document. After importing, we'll see a new folder with all the layers separated and a new pre comp. That is an exact replica of our photoshop document. Great, so now we're ready to set up our scene in after effects. The first thing we should do right now is to make sure each layer is placed in a different pre comp. That's because it will be much easier in the future to replace the objects in each pre comp to get different results for the final animation. We will do it later in the course. For now, just follow my steps, and it will be very clear why we do it very soon. So first, let's put the car layer in its own pre comp. To do this, simply drag the car layer to the pre comp icon in the project panel. We will then be taken to the newly created pre comp automatically. The size of this pre comp is based on the layer size, which is great. However, in our case, we may need to scale the size of this composition a bit, because we will be adding more graphic assets to this pre comp later. To change the size of this pre comp, use the shortcut control K. Now, let's increase the dimensions of this pre comp a bit. Set the height to 800 and the width to 2000. Awesome. We can now go back to the master composition, and before moving on, change the name of our new pre comp. Select it and press Center, and then change the name to car. Press Center once again to finish the action. Now, we can drag this pre comp into our main composition. Then, let's repeat this process for the rest of the layers we have in the photoshop file. Let's select the forest layer and put it in a new pre comp. In this case, we don't have to change the size of the pre comp since we don't want to add anything here later. Now, let's adjust the name of the forest pre comp and drag it into the master comp. Awesome, Let's move on to the next layer. Which is the road? So let's nest it into a pre comp, in this case. Also, don't change the size of it, since we are good with the fact that this pre comp fits the size of the original layer. Now, let's change the name and drag it into the master comp. Finally, let's repeat this process for the sky layer. I'm good with the size of the prep as well, so I'll not change its size. I'll just change the name and drag it into the master comp as well. Well done. We have finished preparing our layers for the animation, and now it's a great time to save the project before moving on. So let's go to file and click on Save As. Now, locate the folder for the course, enter the AE folder, and give this After Effects project file a name. Let's call it animated poster and it Save. Awesome, and now before moving on, let's organize our project panel quickly. Hold down the control or the command key and select all the pre comps we created. Now drag them out from the folder like this. Great. Now let's click on Type to organize all the files here according to their type. Finally, let's tag the master comp in a different color to differentiate it from the rest of the pre comps. And with this, we have finished this part and are ready to move on to the next one, where we will spread the layers across the three D space in after effects to create a nice parallax effect. It's going to be awesome. So see you in the next one. 5. Creating a unique Parallax effect: Welcome back to give your animated poster a very cool look. Think about adding a parallax effect to your sen. This technique makes a two decomposition look three D by moving the layers apart in a three D space, creating a sense of depth and perspective. All right, and now, let's put this principle into action in our composition. First, we need to change all our two D layers to three D layers. If you don't see the three D function, click here to find additional functions in the layers panel. Now, just select all the layers and convert them to three D layers. Make sure to use the classic three D render. If you can't find it here, you can press Control K to enter the composition settings and then go to the three D renderer and select the classic three D. Great. So the next thing we need to do to create a cool parallax effect is to add a new camera to our scene. To do that, just right click on the empty area in the layers panel, then go to new and pick camera. Make sure to go for the one node camera, not the two node. You can find more info about the difference between those two and other camera settings in the beginners guide to after effects that I mentioned earlier. Then, let's use a 35 millimeters lens and click k. Awesome, we've got a new camera in the scene. To see it and move it around manually, we can use two views. Now select the left view. The blue frame will show that you've picked the left view, and all the preview functions will now only affect this view. This means we can now adjust this view from different angles. For now, let's go with the top angle. And now we are viewing our scene from above. Here is our camera, which is pointing at the layers in the scene. Now we can easily move this camera manually backwards, increasing the distance of the camera from the layers. As a result in the right view, we can now see a bit more of the scene. Let's place the camera somewhere here. Now, let's work with our layers in the scene and create the parallax effect by moving the layers closer or further away from the camera, creating a scene with a foreground, mid round, and background. But first, let me teach you an interesting technique to enhance the parallax in you're seen even more than just moving the layers in three D space. So, don't do anything. Just watch and listen to what I'm about to explain. Don't worry. We will soon do it together. So, in cases where you have a layer used as the floor in your scene, you can place the layer in the right position, and it will look fine. And now, I'll just place the forest below the road so we can see it better. On second thought, let me turn off all the layers so you can concentrate on the road and the car. Now, let me switch the view to see it from the left side quickly. That's better. As you can see, when I move the camera up and down, the scene looks very boring, especially when we have a perspective look in our road. That's why I want to teach you how to create a real three D floor in your scene, using a very simple trick. So let's do it together now. First, we need to create a real three D road for the scene. To do that, we will go back to photoshop. Open the road texture we have in the assets folder. To create a three D road in after effects, you should use a flat picture of the floor or a road, without perspective angles in the picture, just a picture from the top view. All right. And now let's create a new layer to add yellow strokes on the road. To do this, select the brush tool and choose a Grene brush from the Built in Brushes library and photoshop. I'll choose this one. Next, select a nice yellow color. You can use this tag to use the same yellow that I'm using. Now, increase the size of the brush. Here's a question for you. What is the shortcut to increase or decrease brush size in photoshop? To do that, we will use the bracket keys on our keyboard. Don't make it too big. Now, place the mouse in the center of the canvas, and while holding shift, draw a line to the other side and back. Next, select the move tool and position this layer in the center of the Canvas. You'll know that you are in the center by the horizontal purple line on your Canvas. I'm talking about this one. Great. Now let's quickly change the names of the layers. And now, to make the stroke, we created look realistic. Let's change the blending mode of this layer to overlay. After that, let's save this file in the design folder and name it road. Then, back and After Effects, double click in the project panel to bring in the new road design we just created. Make sure to bring it in a separate layers with the merged layer styles option. As you can see, after effects automatically change the name of the new pre com to road two because we already have a named road. Let's bring the new road com to our scene and delete the old one. Now, I want to show you a quick trick to make this road and the entire scene look very realistic. To understand better what we are doing, let's turn off all the layers besides the road pre comp and then convert it to a three D layer. Next, let's press R to open up the rotation properties of this layer and now rotate it in the x rotation axis by -90 degrees. Let's move this layer down a bit. And as you can see, we already got some awesome results. Now, we need to rotate this layer so that the strokes on it point to the camera. So let's rotate this layer 90 degrees in the z rotation axis. Now, we need to deal with the missing parts of the road from the right and left sides of it. But before that, let's turn back on the car pre comp and place it right above the road we just created. All right, let's set the previous screen to fit and switch back to two views to check how our scene looks when we move with the camera. As you can see, now we have a nice illusion of depth in the scene. Now, let's go back to working with one view and learn how to create a shadow for the car in the scene. To create a realistic shadow, we can duplicate the car pre comp using the shortcut control. Then select the bottom pre comp and press R to rotate this layer on the x rotation axis to -90 degrees. Next, press P to see the position property of this layer and move the layer down using the y axis. Place this layer just above the road surface. We can also move this layer backward a little bit. Great. And now, let's press enter and change the name of this layer to car shadow. Next, to make it look like a real shadow, we need to apply a few effects on this pre comp. So head over to the effects tab, and first, search for the fill effect. Now drag the effect onto the pre comp and change the color to black. The second effect we will use is the fast box blur effect. Let's apply it to the pre comp and adjust the blur radius until we get a look that we like. We can zoom in a bit and continue adjusting the value. Now let's try 15 or maybe 50. I think 50 looks great. I also think we should move this layer forward a bit. That looks better. Now, let's open the position for the camera and move it up and down to see how the shadow looks from different angles. To improve the look of the shadow, let's select it and press to open up the opacity of this layer. Now, set the opacity to 85 so it will look more like a real shadow. Awesome. Now it's a good time to hit control as to save everything we've done so far. Now I've noticed that there are several areas in the car's mask that need to be adjusted. To fix this, we can return to photoshop and modify the mask on the car layer. First, select the mask and zoom in on the problematic area. Then choose the brush tool. Right click on the Canvas to select the hard round brush. Now, when we draw on the mask, it will hide parts of the picture to reveal the hidden parts, change the brush color to white by pressing the X key. Now, let's scale down the brush size and go over the problematic areas. Now I'll press and scale down the brush to fix this area. Once we're satisfied with the mask, let's save the photoshop file by pressing Control. When we return to after effects, the car layer will be updated with the new mask. Awesome. Now we can move on and continue organizing the layers in the scene. First, let's focus on the forest. For convenience, let's work with two views. Now, select the left view and change it to see the scene from the top. Now, select the forest pre comp and find a good place for it in the scene. Let's place it here for now. Turn off the car to have a clear view. I think we can lower this layer a little bit and then move it backward. Considering the size of the trees, it should be positioned way behind the car's position. Let's place it here. However, the forest seems too small for the scene, but that's not a problem. All we need to do is select this layer and press and scale this layer up. Try different values to see what looks best. I think 170 is okay. Note that we can't see the bottom part of the forest due to the scaling process. So let's bring it up a little bit. All right, I think it looks fine. Now let's move the camera up and down to see if it looks good from different angles. It looks nice. And now let's learn out how to show the missing parts of the road in the seam. To add more of the layer we have, we can use the CC reptile effect. So let's find the effect and drag it onto the road pre comp. And now let's expand this layer from the lower part. Why the lower and not the left? It's because this is actually the bottom part of the pre comp. We see it as the left side in the seam because we rotated this layer from its c axis rotation earlier. That means that this is the bottom part of the pre comp. Therefore, we will expand it from down. All right, I think we can set the value to 600. Now, let's do the same for the right side. In our case, we need to expand it from up because this is actually the upper area of the road pre C. Now I want to show you something. If I go back with the camera to see more of the scene, you will see that the expanded areas we just added look awful. Fix that, usually, we need to change the tiling of the effect to checker flip H, which means creating a mirror duplication horizontally. But since we rotated the layer and expanded its upper and lower parts, we need to change the tiling to checker flip vertically. Now it will look much better. Let's set the preview to fit and place the camera somewhere here where we see the car in the center of the frame. From this camera angle, I see that we need to expand the road even more. So let's select the road and set the values to 1,000 for both. We also need to scale the forest. 200 looks good. Now, let's deal with the last pre comp we have in the scene, which is the sky. To see where to place it. Let's work with two views once again and move the sky to be placed behind the road. Somewhere around here. Now, let's scale this layer up to 300 and move it up. L et's see how that looks when we are moving the camera. I think everything looks great and we are ready to start animating the camera. But before that, let's bring everything back to normal and now activate the action grid for convenience. And place the camera where we think will be a good place for the animation to start. Oh, I think this is a good starting angle. And before moving to the next part, let's create another line for the road for a better look. So let's enter the road pre comp, select the stroke layer, and duplicate it using Control D. Now let's place the strokes in the center of the comp. We can turn off the road texture for now to see the center of the comp better. And now, let's select both layers, zoom in a little bit, and move the layers up. Looks nice. Let's turn back on the road texture and go back to the master comp to see how that looks. I think they are too far apart from each other. Let's adjust it until we get some better results. Awesome. I think it looks great. Let's save the project one more time and start animating the scene. And we will do that in the next part. So see you there. But before that, feel free to take a break from sitting, grab a refreshing drink, and do some light stretches before diving back into the course. These quick activities will help you stay focused for the next lesson. 6. Camera animation: Welcome back. After finishing setting up the scene, we are now ready to animate it, starting with animating the camera, let's learn the best way to do that. To move the camera, we can change the three different values in the position property. The Z axis is for moving the camera forward and backward. The y axis is for moving the camera up and down, and the x axis is for moving the camera to the sides. Right now, all the axis are combined, which is fine. However, if you want more control over the camera movement,'s better to separate each axis. To do this, right click on the position property and select separate dimensions. Now we can control and animate each axis separately. So now, let's adjust the y axis to get an interesting angle for the beginning of the camera animation. This will give our animation a dynamic start. I think that's a nice angle from which to start the animation. Now, let's make sure the time indicator is at the beginning of the timeline and create the first key frame for the cameras y axis. Then, let's move to second number two and bring the camera up. O. Somewhere around here. Next, let's go to second number four. Now copy the first keyframe and paste it here to bring the camera to its initial position. This will create a smooth animation loop. Now, let's go back to the beginning of the timeline and create keyframes for the Z axis as well to create a smooth zoom in and out animation. First, let's find a good camera angle for the initial keyframe. Next, move to the second two and move the camera backward. Finally, let's go to second four and duplicate the first key frame we created for the Z axis. I think it looks great. But if you want to adjust the animation, make sure you are standing with the time indicator exactly on the key frame you want to change and only then adjust the value. Let's adjust the y position at the beginning of the animation, which is the position of the first key frame. Now, click here to deselect the key frames, and then let's move to the second key frame, and adjust it. After making adjustments, remember to copy the updated first keyframe and paste it on the last keyframe to update it as well. Let's see how it looks now. I think we can lower the camera a bit more at this point. That's better. Additionally, we can bring the forest layer. Let's see how that looks. I think we can scale it down a little bit. This is the process of creating a parallax scene. Based on the camera animation, you can always move the objects in the scene and adjust their location until you get something that you like. All right. So once we are good with the results, we can move on and improve the look of the scene by adding some nice depth of field to it. This is basically creating a focus point in your scene, where the other areas will be blurred out. Let me show you how to do that. To turn on the depth of field. First, we need to enter the camera options and turn it on from here. Now, let's increase the aperture to increase the blurriness of the camera. As you can see, we already see some changes in the scene, but not in the right place because we want the car to be in focus. To fix it, we need to adjust the focus point to the car's position. And to do it, first, let's work with two views to see what we are doing better. Now, if I select the car, we will see its position in the scene. Now all we need to do is to bring the focus to this area. But first, let's go to the beginning of the animation and zoom in a bit in the right view to see what we are doing better. All right. Now let's select the camera and adjust the value of the focus distance, which is the white line you can see in the left view. I'm talking about this line right here. Let's bring it to the car position. Awesome. It looks great. You can also change the blur type if you want to see which fits your scene the most. Go over the different types and see what you love the most. In my case, I'll choose the triangle version. Awesome. So now after creating a nice depth of field effect, we have a small problem. When the camera moves, the focus distance will move with it and won't be pointed at the car anymore. As you can see, the focus distance point is here right now. You might not see a lot of difference in our scene because this is not a big change in the camera's position, but I still want to teach you a very useful trick to make the camera focus point always at the object you need, no matter where we move the camera. In our case, we need the focus to stay always at the car. And we can do it by parenting the focus of the camera to the car's position. But as you can see in the example, parenting the values won't work. So let me show you how to do it using a very simple expression. What is expression? Expression is a piece of code that you can use to automate and control various properties of your animation. It is a powerful tool that enables you to create complex animations without having to keyframe every single element manually. All right. So now, let's create a cool expression in our camera so that the focus distance always points at the car's position. Making it the focused object in the scene no matter where the camera moves. So first, we need to open up the car's position property. And now, to create the expression for the focus distance, hold down the Ault key Option key on Mac, and click on the Stopwatch of the focus distance property. Now, in the expression text bar, write, length and choose the preset. Then in the parentheses, write, transform, dot, position. And now drag the focus piquip to the car's position property. Make sure your expression looks exactly like mine, and then click somewhere outside the box to finish the action. If you see a yellow icon, that means you have some missing word, character, or symbol in your expression. Double check to make sure you're not missing anything. All right, so now. The camera focus will stick to the car's position, no matter where we move the camera. I think it looks great. And if you don't want the focus effect, you can always turn off the depth of field from the camera options and turn it back on when needed. Moreover, remember that you can always adjust the blurriness in the scene by changing the aperture property. Also, keep in mind that the more aperture you use, the more difficult it will be for your computer to process the preview and render the scene. Moreover, we can also animate the aperture to have a different level of blurringness in the scene at different points in time. Let's start at the beginning of the animation and create the first keyframe for the aperture with a value of 100. Then to blur out the road in the second part, let's increase the value until we get a nice result. Pay attention to this area. I think 800 will work. This will make the car stand out even more in the scene. Awesome. Now let's move to the end of the animation, copy the first keyframe, and paste it here to bring the blurriness back to the level at the beginning. Great. Now let's select the camera and press you to see only the key frames we have on this layer. Then check the animation we created. See a quick preview, we can lower the preview quality to quarter, go to the preview tab, select our composition, and set the preview playback to skip two frames. This way, we can see the preview playback render much faster. Finally, let's go to the end of the animation and bring the work area to this point. We can do it manually or use the end key. This way, the work area will jump to the time indicators position. All right. Now let's hit the space bar key and see what we've got a few times. I think that looks very good. We can bring everything back to normal and move on to the next part, where we will learn how to enhance our scenes look with basic, but very useful color correction techniques. It's going to be awesome, so see you there. 7. Color Correction techniques: Welcome back. In this part, we will learn how to use basic color correction effects to improve the look of our animated poster. In this case, we will make it look like a black and white poster. Usually, to use color correction effects like curves and levels. I recommend applying them to a new adjustment layer in the scene so that they will affect all objects in the scene at once. But in our case, I want to create a unique color correction process for each object separately. Will give us more control over how the scene will look in the end. With that said, let's go to the effects tab and search for a hue and saturation effect to apply it to the car and reduce all the colors in this pre com. Then, let's add a curves effect and adjust it until we get a nice and contrasting look for the car. Drag this point to the right to increase the black colors. And drag this point to the left to increase the white colors. Finally, to get a cool highlight on the upper areas of the car. We can right click on the pre comp, go to layer styles, and add an inner shadow effect. For now, the inner shadow is black. To make it look like a highlight, we need to open the effect and change the color to white. Let's set the opacity to 100 for now. Finally, to see the white color, we need to change the blending mode of the effect on the layer to screen. And there you go. We have some nice highlights on the car. We can now adjust the angle of the effect, so we can see it only on the upper areas of the car. So adjust the value until you get something that you like. I think we can set it to 100. Now we can set the size to ten to get a bit more soft look to it. You can play around with these parameters until you get something that you like and fits your design. I think it looks great. Let's finish by setting the opacity of the effect to 80, so it will look more realistic. Great. Now we can move on to the next object in the scene, which is the road. This time, I won't add a hue and saturation effect on the pre comp because I want to keep the yellow lines in color. Therefore, I'll go into this pre comp and add the hue and saturation effect only to the road texture layer, then reduce the saturation. Now let's return to the master comp and see how that looks. I think it looks great, and since the road is already a very contrasted picture, I won't add the curves effect to it. All right, let's move on to the forest pre comp. To save some time, we can select the car pre comp, copy the effects on it, and then paste them onto the forest pre comp. Now, let's adjust the curves effect here to make the forest look a bit darker. We can also open up the car layer to copy the inner shadow effect on it. So let's select the layer style on this layer. Press Control C, then select the forest layer and press Control V to paste it here. Let's turn off the sky to see what we are doing. I think we should soften the effect on this layer a little bit. For this, we can adjust the size and opacity of the effect. Let's set the opacity to 60. Great. Now we can close the layer and copy the effects, then paste them onto the sky pre comp. I think we should add more contrast to the sky. We can achieve this by adjusting the curves effect. All right. I think it looks great. Let's save everything we've done so far by pressing controls. And before we move on to the next part, I want to show how we can enhance the camera movement in the scene by animating the sky. Let me show you what I mean. First, place the time indicator at 2 seconds so we can see more of the sky. Then select the anchor point tool and grab the y axis of the anchor point of this layer to bring it down near the bottom part of the layers boundaries. Now, let's go back to the selection tool and bring this layer up a little bit. Next, let's go to the beginning of the animation to check if the new sky looks all right at the start. We shouldn't move it too much up. Everything looks great, so we're ready to animate it. We'll animate the scale of this layer, so let's select it and process to see the scale property. Now, let's scale this layer down as much as we can, so it will still be entirely visible on the screen and create the first key frame. Then move to second two and scale this layer to 300. Finally, go to 4 seconds and copy and paste the first keyframe here. Let's see how that looks. Be patient and give it a few seconds to the preview to render the scene. As you can see, the scaling animation of the skies, together with the camera movement, has added a more dramatic feeling to the scene. I think it looks super cool. We can now save the project once again. With that, we've finished this part, and we're ready to move on to the next one, where we will add some cool new graphic elements to the scene and learn how to create a super cool stretch text animation. It's going to be super fun. So see you there. 8. Stretched Text Animation: Welcome back. In this part, we'll learn how to improve the animation using simple elements like a shape layer and a text layer that we'll animate in a stretchy way. Let's get started. First, let's create a simple sphere that we will place behind the car. So first, let's click here to ensure no layer is selected. And now, click and hold the rectangle tool and select the ellipse tool. Choose a nice red color for it and turn off the stroke. Now, hold down the shift key and create an ellipse, set it size to 500. Now name it and align it to the center of the composition. Next, switch to the selection tool. Convert this layer to a three D layer. We can place this layer below the forest, and now use the two views to place it behind the forest in the scene. Awesome. Isolate this layer to see it better, then select the anchor point tool to move the anchor point to the bottom of the layer. This way, when we animate the scale, it will scale up from the bottom, which looks more interesting. Press S to bring up the scale property, isolate the layer, and move the time indicator to the beginning of the animation to create the first key frame. Set the size to 500 at the start. Switch back to one view and set the preview to fit. The sphere looks too big, so let's change the size to 400 or 450. That looks better. I'll create the first keyframe. Move to the two second mark and set the size to zero. Finally, go to the end of the animation and set the size back to 450. Let's see how that looks. Great. It looks awesome. Now let's create the stretch text animation. But first, let's bring everything back to normal. Then create the text that needs to be here. To do that, select the text tool and type long way. Now, to see better what we are doing. Isolate this layer and turn on the transparent background. Change the text color to black. Use the anybody font from Google Fonts. We'll use the condensed version with a bold weight. Now set the font size to 200. Then go to the paragraph panel, center the text, and align it to the center of the composition. I think the text should be bolder. To make the text bolder, go to the character panel, make the text all caps, and select the black weight. That's better. Now let's switch back to the selection tool and try to find a good place for the text in the scene. So isolate the layer to see the rest of the scene and find a nice place for it. I think it should be somewhere around here. All right, and now for a better workflow, let's precompose this layer. This will make it easier to work on without any objects in the scene interrupting us. Moreover, it will be more convenient to find a good place for it in the scene after animating the text. Awesome. Now let's learn how to create a stretch text animation in after effects. By the way, if text animation interests you and you want to learn more about it, you're welcome to watch my course, text in motion, and learn everything you need to know about text animations in After effects. All right, so to change the form of the text and stretch it, we first need to convert this layer into a shaped layer. By doing this, we get a path that we can modify however we want, similar to the create outline function in Adobe Illustrator. This gives us the freedom to change the form of the text by adjusting the created path. To do this in after effects, right click on the text layer, go to Create, and select Create Shapes from text. We can now delete the original layer and rename the new one. Just remember that after converting the text to a shape, you will not be able to edit the text since it's no longer a text layer, but a shaped layer. All right, now I want the text to stretch from the center upwards and downwards. So first, let's use the aligned tool to center this layer in the composition. Then let's center its anchor point as well. To do this, we can use the Anchor Point tool, hold down Control or command on Mac, and double click on it. This is a quick way to center the anchor point on a layer instead of moving it manually. Just don't forget to switch back to the selection tool after doing that. Now, to stretch the text upwards and downwards, we need to find the path of this shaped layer. So open it and then open the contents inside this shaped layer. As you can see, this shaped layer consists of a bunch of smaller shaped layers, which are actually the shapes created from the letters of the text layer. There is a path for each shape that we can change and manipulate. We will create key frames for these paths to create a stretched animation. Here's a quick tip when creating stretched text animations, try to work with sounds cerre fonts. This makes it much easier to create the stretch text animation, since there are fewer points to adjust after converting the text to shapes. Great. Now instead of opening the path for each shape manually. We can just select this layer and use the layers panel search bar to open all the paths on this layer. Since there are many shapes here, we can adjust our panel arrangements for more convenient work. Let me show you what I mean. First, hover over the timeline panel. When you see the mouse cursor, I can showing two white panels, that's how you know you can move this panel to another place. Let's drag it to the right side here. Now we can enlarge the preview panel and set it to fit so we can see the entire frame. Let's also enlarge the composition panel and zoom in on the timeline. Make sure you are at the beginning of the timeline, then create the first key frame for all the paths of all the shapes in our shaped layer. Now, press you to see only the key frames we created and move to the two second mark. Awesome. Now let's start adjusting the paths for each shape to create the stretched defect. We'll start with the letter L. Select the bottom points and drag them down. Hold down the shift key while doing so. Then select the upper points and drag them up. Now let's do the same for the rest of the three letters here. Click on one of the points to unselect the previous selection, and now select all the bottom points of these shapes, and then move them down. Note that if you are using a different font, you will get different points on your path. This might cause your letters to stretch in a weird way, especially with rounded letters. In such cases, you will need to add additional points to the shape before stretching it out. All right. Moving on. Let's bring these points down here. Then let's select the upper points and drag them up. Great. Now let's try to fix the end path because it looks too condensed. For this, we can select one of the points in this area, delete it, and then move the remaining point down a little bit. Let's do the same for the bottom part as well. So select one point, delete it, and move the remaining point up. Let's see how that looks. All right. I think that looks very nice. Let's place the time indicator back to second two, and we can move on to the next word. Select one of the points here to unselect the previous selection. Now, select all the bottom points of the word and drag them down. As you can see, the selection I made was not good, which can happen sometimes. Press Control Z to undo the action. Hold shift, and click on these two points to unselect them. Let's try it now. All right. Now I see that I should reselect the point in the letter A path. So let's press Control Z and reselect the right bottom points. Okay, I see that I need to unselect some points in the path. Let's press Control Z once again. Hold shift and unselect these two points. That's better. Now let's drag the selected points down here. Next, let's deal with the upper points. Great, and now we can fix the condensed areas in the A and W paths. So let's click here to unselect the selected path. Now, select one of the points, delete it, and move the remaining point to the correct place, which is where we move the point of the letter. We can move the path point here too. But first, let's delete the necessary point. Now, move the remaining point up a little bit. Let's do the same with the W path. Let's see how that looks. I think it looks awesome. Now, let's move to second four and copy all the first key frames. Then paste them here to finish the animation. All right. Now I want us to create a small offset in the animation between the letters, to make it look a little bit more interesting. But first, let's make some room for the timeline panel. Set the preview to fit, and learn to create a nice offset in the animation. I want the first letter to start moving to be the letter L, and then the rest of the letters will start the animation one after another. First, we need to identify the key frames that belong to the letter L. To do this, we can reopen the contents, and to make it more convenient. We can close all the open properties. Hold down control, or command, close the contents, and then reopen them once again without holding control. Now we will see all the shapes with all the properties closed. All right, so here is the path of the letter L, and now I'm sure these keyframes need to be first in the order. Now, let's press you to go back to working with the keyframes and start off setting them. Select all the keyframes except the L path keyframes, then zoom in a bit on the timeline. Move all the selected key frames one frame forward. And now, I want to show you a nice shortcut to move the key frames forward or backward. First, select all the keyframes except the L and O paths key frames. And instead of moving them manually one frame forward, hold down the ult key and press the right arrow on the keyboard. Let's use this shortcut and continue offsetting all the key frames. Now we have a more interesting animation. And now, I want to note something important. If we open the contents and see the path of the letters. We will notice that some letters consist of two paths like the shape that creates the letter O. As you can see, there are two paths that create the shape of the O. In cases like this, we should align the timing of the key frames of these two paths together so the animation will look good. We have another example of this situation with the letter A. Let's align the key frames of the second path of this shape to the first one. Now we have a perfect animation. Let's select the layer and press you to see only the key frames. And now, if you want to create a larger offset, select all the key frames and move them one frame forward in the timeline. Be careful not to create an offset between the aligned paths, like in the letters, and A. All right. I think it looks very good, and we can bring this panel back to its original place. Then, let's return to the master composition and convert our text pre comp to a three D layer to find a suitable position for it in the scene. Let's set the preview to quarter and work with two views for more convenience. Now, let's drive the text to somewhere around here and raise it slightly. Okay, I think we can bring it closer. By the way, for more precise movement of this pre comp, you can press P to access the position property and adjust the values from there. Let's move the time indicator to see how it looks across the entire animation. While doing so, let's continue to find a good spot for the text in the scene. I think we can bring it closer to the car and scale it up. Let's lower this pre comp using the Y position. Now, let's select the pre comp and press S to scale it up. L et's bring it much closer to the car. Now, let's adjust the position to find the perfect spot. So press P and adjust the position values. I think that looks very good. Let's bring everything back to normal. All right, I think it looks nice, and we can move on to creating the final asset to enhance the scene, which is adding a flashlight to the car. For this, let's enter the pre comp of the car, select the ellipse tool, make it white with no stroke, and create a small sphere. Just make sure no layer is selected before creating the sphere. Now, let's set its size to 300 and change the name to flash. Now, let's open the layer, select the ellipse from here, and add a pucker and blow defect to it. Now, by adjusting the amount of this effect, we can achieve a star shape. Next, let's go to the effects panel. Find the fast box blur effect, and apply it to the flash layer. Now, let's adjust the value of the blur radius until we get some nice blur effect. Then let's fine tune the amount of the pucker and bloat effect until we achieve a desired look. Finally, let's move this shape here and find a suitable blending mode for this layer to make it look realistic. In our case, we can set it to add. We can also press t to reduce the opacity of this layer. Great. Now let's duplicate this layer with control D, move it to the left and scale it down a bit. L et's duplicate the new layer again and move it here. Awesome. Now let's go back to the master composition and see how it looks in my opinion. It's a bit too bright. Let's return to the car composition and reduce the opacity to 65. I think it looks much better. We can now press control us to save the project. With this, we've finished this part, and we're ready to move on to the final section of this course, where we will learn how to enhance the animation and render the final piece. It's going to be awesome, so see you there. But before that, feel free to take a break from sitting, grab a refreshing drink, and do some light stretches before diving back into the course. These quick activities will help you stay focused for the next lesson. 9. Improve the animation and render the final piece: Hi, and welcome to the final part of this course in which we will improve the animation and render the final project. Let's start with improving the animation. And when I say improving the animation, I mean adjusting the key frames. We can do it by converting all the key frames we got to EZ Es key frames. For this, we need to see all the key frames we have in the scene. So let's make sure no layer is selected and press you to see all the keyframes on all the layers. Let's set the preview to fit, and now select all the key frames. Now, right click, go to keyframe assistance and choose EZ Es. Or we could use the shortcut F nine. So now, if you check the animation, we will see that the motion is now soft and less robotic. Give after effects some time to preview the scene. Looks nice. Now we can improve the motion even more by going to the graph editor. So first, let's select all the keyframes once again. And click here to enter the graph editor. Now, right click here to make sure we are using the speed graph, and now we can adjust the acceleration of the motion and the acceleration of the motion by adjusting the key frame handles. This will make the motion start slower, gain speed in the middle of the motion, and slow down the motion at the end of the animation. To make the motion look a bit more uniform. That is, to maintain the acceleration of the motion to be exactly the same at the beginning and at the end. We can try to set the influence percentage to be the same at the beginning and at the end of the animation. But as you can see, it can be very difficult to do it manually. It's hard to set the influence percentage exactly the same number as the rest of the key frames. That is why I want to show you a quicker way to do that. So first, we need to select the key frames of the property we want to adjust, then right click on one of them and enter the keyframe velocity. Here, we will see the influence percentages that we saw in the graph editor, which controls the incoming and outgoing velocity. That is, the acceleration at the beginning and the end of this animation. I usually set both to 85%. However, you can try different combinations to see how that affects the motion in your scene in your future projects. In the graph editor, it will look like we dragged the handles of the key frames like that. An important thing to remember while using this method is that you can't select different property types and adjust the velocity for all at once. As you can see, even if I selected all the key frames. Right now, I will change only the cameras depth of field aperture property key frames. So make sure to adjust each property type one by one. And now, I want to show you a handy short cut to enter the key frame velocity panel. Let's select the Z position key frames, hold down the alt key, and double click on one of the key frames. And there it is. Now, let's set the velocity to 85 and hit ok. If you want, you can use free plugins and scripts to control the velocity of your key frames even quicker. In our case, I'll continue doing that by myself. Here, I can see that we have two same scale properties, which means I can select all of the scale keyframes I have here and change the velocity for both. All right. Let's see how that looks. Looks great. And now let's do the same for the stretch text animation. So let's enter the text comm. Here is a question for you. Can we change all the key frames here at once? Or we need to select and change them on by one? We can change the velocity for all the keyframes at once, since there are key frames for the same property. As you can see, by changing the velocity of the keyframes, we get a much more interesting motion. And if you go to the graph editor, it will look like we move the handles of the keyframes here to create an Easys motion. All right, so now let's go back to the master comp and continue with the project. But before that, I noticed that the text timing was not quite well. As you can see, at this point in time, the text is out of the frame. It's happening because after offsetting the key frames, the entire animation lasts over 4 seconds. If we go back to the text comp, we will see that some key frames pass the four second mark. That means we need to speed up this animation a bit. We can do it by moving all the keyframes to the left, so the animation will end at the second number four. Let me show you how to do it. First, select all the key frames, hold down the ult key, and drag the last keyframe in this layer to the left. This will move all the keyframes at once while maintaining the same distance between them during the process. And now, if we check the animation in the master comp, the text animation will fit the timing of the entire scene. Let's see how that looks now. Great. We are now ready to render the animation. But before that, let's close all the open pre comps and organize our project panel, because working with an organized project panel can save you time in the future and finding the right pre comp or asset you are searching for. To start, let's change the color of the text pre comp to sandstone, matching the rest of the pre comps. Next, create a new folder called pre comps and move all the pre comps from the project panel into this folder, except for the Master comp, which should remain outside for quick access. Then create another folder named assets and place all the graphic assets from the project into it. Awesome, and now, let's improve the scene by adding a noise effect. To apply the effect to the entire scene, we can use an adjustment layer that will affect all the layers in the scene. To do this, right click in the layers panel, go to New and select adjustment layer. Make sure the adjustment layer is placed above all the layers, so the effect will be applied to all them. Now, let's change the name of this layer to noise and search for the effect in the effect tab. To create a high quality noise, let's use the HLS noise effect. Let's zoom in a bit and adjust the properties of the effect until we get something we like. Make sure the preview quality is set to full, so you can see how it will look in the final output. All right, I think it looks great, and now we can render the animation. Here's a quick tip for you. If you want to render your projects in better quality in terms of colors, you can click here to enter the project settings and change the bit depth to 16 or 32 bits per channel. It might slow the render times, but the result will look a bit better. All right, so to render the project, we can go to composition and select one of the two options for rendering. And if you can't select it, it's because you didn't select the comp you want to render in the project panel. So let's select the master comp and try to render it again. Now, we can choose between the two options. Here, you will go to the render panel of the external program called Media Encoder, which is totally fine. But since After Effects updated their rendering settings in 2022, to render MP four files right from the After Effects render panel, we can use the render K of After Effect without going to the Media Encoder. So to start, open the output module and choose the 50 megabits per second option from the presets, which provides a high quality MP four file. If you can't find this option, click here to access the rendering options. And now, in the format section, select H 264, then go to format options. Ensure that VBR one pass is selected, and set it to 50. Click and choose where to save the render. To do this, click on the output mode, locate the folder for the course, enter the render folder, name the file. After that, click save and finally hit the render button. Now, be patient and wait for the render to finish. When the render is finished, we can open the output mode and click the link provided here. It will take you straight to the rendered folder where we rendered the project. Let's see how it looks. I think it looks awesome, but I want to point out something very important. Although our animation looks good during the rendering process, I noticed that I rendered the project with no background layer. As you can see, if I turn on and off the transparent background, you will notice that because of the blurred areas created by the depth of field of the camera, these areas are transparent. It does not affect the project, but it can affect you in your next projects. That's why I want you to experience this situation and make sure you pay attention to the small details before rendering. Right, so let's fix it real quick. For this, right click in the layer panel and create a new solid. Make it white and name it BG. Finally, make sure it's the composition size and hit okay. Now, place this layer below all the layers. And if you don't like the bright look, just select the solid layer and press control shift it to enter its settings. Now, change the color to black. I think it looks much better. And now, before rendering this comp again, I'd like to share a quick tip to avoid any issues during the final render. Let's go to edit, then head over to the Purge function, and select all memory and disk cache. By doing this, we'll essentially clean up unnecessary data that's accumulated behind the scenes in a folder on our computer. This data can slow down after effects and cause bugs and preview and workflow. By clearing this cache, we can prevent these issues. If you want to locate or change where this data is stored on your computer, you can find it in the preferences under the media and disk cache section. All right. Let's hit okay and wait a few seconds. Great, and now let's select the master composition and render the project once again. We can choose the previous render to replace it with a new one, then click Render and k. Awesome. With this, we have completed the course. Let's see the final render once again. Well done, I'm really proud of you, and I hope you enjoyed creating this animated poster that you can showcase in your portfolio or share on your social media channels. You can now return to After Effects and close the project. Be sure to save it before doing so. Also, let's close the photoshop designs we worked on and exit Photoshop. Thank you for watching. And now it's time for you to move on to the homework I prepared for you. Don't be lazy and do it after taking a few minutes of break. I'll be glad to see your home task and give you an honest review. So make sure you do it well. 10. Home Task: Hi, and congrats on finishing the course. Now it's time to put your skills to the test. Your task is to create a similar animated poster like the one we made in the course. You have two options, an easy one and a challenging one. It's up to you to choose. Let's go through each option. So the first one is the easy one. This task, all you need to do is use the animation you already created during the course and replace the assets we got in the scene. Now, when you get the new asset, make sure it fits the comp size. But in case you want to change the comp size, make sure to scale it and place it in the right place in the scene. By the way, now you know that putting assets into Preps is very useful, especially when you know you'll want to swap out some assets in the scene later on. Right. And now I want to mention a very important note to remember while doing so. When replacing assets, like a car or road, try to use images with the same angle and perspective as the original ones. Using photos with different perspectives can make things look really strange. Also, if you're looking for a four texture, try to find one taken from a top down angle. All right. And now let's dive into the second option for the task, which is a bit challenging. For this one, you'll need to create a completely new animated poster from scratch. Here's what it should include. I'd like you to create the parallax effect in the scene, which means you should have foreground, mid round, and background parts in your scene. In the mid round area, you can add a different main object like an animal, a character, or a product of your choice. Another thing I want you to create is a floor or a road in the scene. I also want you to add some nice camera animation, like moving up and down, zooming in and out, or panning side to side. Your new animated poster should last 4 seconds. And as a bonus, I would like you to add some stretch text animation. As for the colors, you can use any colors you want. That's it for the home task. Choose the option that you like and start working on it as soon as possible. If you have a question, feel free to ask me. I will do my best to help you out. Good luck. 11. Outro: Hey, and congrats on completing the course. I hope you enjoyed it and learn something new. Don't forget to finish the home task and make sure to share it with me. You can follow me on social media and feel free to ask me anything. With that said, thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next one.